The Broken Boy
by Lecherous Fever
Summary: He doesn't know where he is, but he can feel him searching. / Ventus-centric.


Perhaps the most notable thing about living within the heart of someone else is that time, the passage of it and the wish for it, begins to mean nothing.

He isn't sure how long he's been here, couldn't even begin to estimate whether it's been days or months or years inside this comforting cocoon. Ventus tries desperately to imagine, but all concept of time and movement and life is gone here.

When you a share a heart, you inevitably share everything. Thoughts, emotions, desires and fears – everything experienced melds together at the juncture of where one person ends and the other begins. Then it spreads, like ripples through water. Soon, the host dreams of faces that the spare knows, daydreams about things he himself has never seen. And so the sleeper must stay quiet, so that the boy who saved his fractured heart might live in any sort of peace.

And quiet, Ventus does a good job of staying. In the beginning, he was weak, and desperate. Shattered though he was, his heart could not quell its terror; a hopeless outcry for his closest friends and for his greatest enemy. He worried ceaselessly about Terra and Aqua, traces of them having disappeared one after the other. But he worried more about the darkness that had once been part of him. Vanitas. He had watched him fade, felt himself grow weaker. But he had survived... hadn't he? Light and darkness were two halves of a whole. If one half lives, so might the other, he feared. With everything he had, Ventus had then been reaching out for his lost friends and seeking out a darkness he could no longer feel.

His memories of Terra and Aqua had begun to manifest in the boy's dreams, and more than once he felt him jolt awake with visions of the Keyblade Graveyard still living in his mind, a poisonous voice still whispering in his ears. The worse the nightmares grew, the harder Ventus tried to rest, tried to still his emotions. It worked well enough. In those earlier days, he was frail enough to simply sleep in this warm heart, his friends a constant but altogether subdued part of his thoughts. Ventus didn't have the strength to keep it up, nor did he have the will to make his saviour's life a misery. He'd already done more than enough for him.

So Ventus kept quiet; not searching, but waiting. One day, he was sure, his friends would come back for him. He let himself drift into the peaceful slumber of defeat, and his memories went with him.

* * *

The blue eyes are what come back to him first. They were eyes that had implored Ven to fight back. To get up on his feet and meet him for every blow, until the next time he fell. It wouldn't matter that he did. With each day, he'd figure out another piece of the pattern to Terra's moves. The progress came slowly but surely - dodging a hit that would once have floored him, landing ever more blows on his stronger opponent. They moved from lashing out blindly to knowing each other's battle patterns inside out. But neither of them cared that there would be no victor. It was the time spent together, the triumph in being so familiar, the unspoken agreement to collapse against each other when it was all over to rest and talk about everything and nothing.

Terra's light blue eyes had been a constant comfort – strong and determined, but always looking out for him. Ventus sees a faint glimmer of those eyes in Riku's; not so much in the shape or colour, but in the promise that lay behind them, the similar pull and bond and willingness to teach. A defender's eyes.

The longer the two boys spent their days together, the easier it was for Ventus to sleep.

* * *

He sees flashes of her in the red-haired girl who makes Ventus think of seashells, of Wayfinders and promises and days spent dreaming. But the picture isn't perfect, even if painted by the same brush. There's a mystery and an openness to this girl that isn't the same. But the way the boy thinks of her is almost identical; echoes what Ventus remembers of his days with Aqua. It's the mix of care and admiration that forms the basis of a friendship meant to last. It's not perfect, but it's a comfort. He's glad that the boy has good friends at his side – not only because they're his strength, but because they help him to remember in the husk of his heart. It keeps him happy while he lies low, trying his best not to be the intruder he feels like.

He was not there to hear Aqua promise that she'd come back for him. He doesn't know that she is slinking alone in the Realm of Darkness; that it will be many years before he sees her again.

(If he ever sees her again.)

* * *

He doesn't know where he is, but he can feel him searching. The irascible spirit pulls at him – he feels it at any moment in which doubt overtakes him; when he doesn't know what year it is, when he thinks he'll never be able to leave. The tendrils of himpull hardest at the remnants of his heart when he contemplates being condemned to this muffled, half-experience of someone else's life, until they all meet their true end. He _is_ his negativity, his every trace of darkness given form, and Ventus can't tell if it is slowly returning to him or if it is he who slowly falls back into it.

Vanitas had cared for nothing and no one else. Any and all emotions born within him turned to creatures of darkness, permeating the earth as he continued with his existence; all the sadism and solipsism that Ventus would never have made tangible, made dangerous. The lives of no other held any value whatsoever to him. Until his own was destroyed. Part of another, he is doomed to be incomplete, until he finds his host again.

But it won't matter until either of them is strong enough. And by then, he'll be out of the boy's heart.

* * *

A heart without darkness does not equal a heart without fear. But even if it did, the boy Sora has his own darkness to contest. There is plenty to fear in a world of safety, not least when and how that world will shatter. Because it is a world to Ventus now. It is everything he knows and does, grasping to memories and glimpses and playing out a half-life within in the vaguest of waking dreams.

He had felt the boy's heart corrupted once before, in a place at once familiar and alien. His heart was overrun with a void, bridged only by the streams of fear and panic and a wish to capture what was lost. It was devastation playing out in front of him. Neither Ventus nor his host recall it now, but what haunted the both of them through those endless rooms were the blue eyes of the girl, the watercolour wash-out of another person he'd much rather recall, but found himself unable to.

Ventus had also felt an extreme closeness to... something. Within drifting distance, he felt as if there were something he could return to, if he had the strength.

He remembers nothing of it now.

* * *

Sora feels it too now, and Ventus can't stop it. He tries not to react so the boy won't have to feel it, won't have to know, but his efforts are futile.

"_You are the one who has made your heart a prison…"_

The voice oozes darkness, but it quite quickly becomes the voice of another – weaker, but no less wreathed in malice.

"…_Even if you are not the prisoner."_

Ventus hears the echo of the boy's terrified thought. He has immense courage. He picks himself up and carries on, struggles through the weight of worry and confusion. But not before Ventus has heard the fear fluttering through his heart.

_Why does he look so much like me?_

He has stirred now, and has trouble falling once again into sleep. Vanitas is there and everything he feared has become true. He still cannot feel his friends, no matter how hard he tries to reach out for them. It's as if their hearts just aren't there. Ventus tries hard to hold on tight to the memory of them. He can't imagine the havoc this is playing with his host, but no longer can he stay silent, not while he feels his dark half pulling, struggling, _living_.

He hears his voice. But worse still, he hears his silence.


End file.
